christopher price

FOXBORO -- Regardless of where they land on the schedule, games in Miami have a way of revealing the true character of a Patriots team.

In many ways, New England’s season has pivoted on the annual trip to South Florida, and left the team heading into one of two directions. Tested by the steamy conditions, some have wilted under pressure. Or, it has revealed a previously undiscovered level of fortitude and mental toughness that can come to define a team and a season.

For the Patriots, it all started in 2001. In Tom Brady’s first career start on the road, he and the Patriots were crushed by the Dolphins, 30-10. The quarterback had one of the worst games of his professional career, going 12-for-23 for 86 yards with four sacks.

”That was my second game -- we got our butts kicked pretty bad,” Brady said this week in a conference call with the Miami media.

Following the game, the Patriots symbolically “buried” the game ball when they returned to Foxboro. New England lost just two more games the rest of the way on the way to Super Bowl XXXVI.

”We had a lot of work to do and we did. That team really was a great Patriot team and ended up having a great storybook ending to that season,” Brady recalled. “That was a real turning point.”

There were no such turning points for the Patriots when they made their 2009 trip to Miami, only the beginning of the end for a team that was perhaps the most mentally soft squad of the Bill Belichick era. In that contest, the Patriots were shocked 22-21 by the Dolphins, who wondered aloud after the game why they had such an easy time beating a New England team that mailed it in down the stretch.

”When things don’t go your way you have to fight back -- that’s a challenge for all of us,” Brady said after that defeat. “I think at times we do. And at times I don’t think we fight very hard.”

It was the ultimate indictment of the worst roster of the Belichick era, a team that went one-and-done in the playoffs soon after that defeat.

Of course, there’s been plenty of good with the bad. In 2003, the Patriots broke an 0-13 slump in September and October in Miami with a dramatic overtime win over the Dolphins, culminated with an 82-yard pass play from Brady to Troy Brown that sparked a Mary Tyler Moore-style celebration from Belichick, who tossed his headset. The level of resolve displayed in that game came to be the Patriots’ calling card the rest of the year -- they didn’t lose another game on the way to a second title in three seasons. In 2004, a brutal late-season defeat to a woeful Miami team on “Monday Night Football” served as a cautionary tale for team that needed to guard against complacency down the stretch. Again, there were no more losses the rest of the way to another title.

Of course, not all the games have served as a referendum on the state of the team. In 2007, there were no particular lessons to be learned -- the biggest takeaway in that one was an astounding performance from a New England offense that was pretty typical over the course of the first half of the season. Brady threw for 354 yards and six touchdowns in a 49-28 torching of the Dolphins. And in 2011, it was more of the same as Brady and the Patriots kickstarted another run to the Super Bowl with a 38-24 win on the opener than included an astonishing 517 passing yards from Brady.

So what’s going to happen this year? Season-openers between the Patriots and Dolphins in Miami have never been boring. Witness Brady’s fireworks in the first game of the 2011 campaign (which included a 99-yard touchdown pass to Wes Welker), not to mention the fact that Wednesday marked the 20th anniversary of one of the great shootouts of all time between Dan Marino and Drew Bledsoe. The two combined for 894 yards with nine touchdowns and three interceptions in a 39-35 Miami win in South Florida.

In the end, the first game of the regular season is always a tone-setter for the rest of the year. But because we know the annual trips to South Florida are particularly illuminating for this franchise, history tells us that by 4 p.m. on Sunday we should have an exceptionally realistic level of expectations when it comes to the 2014 Patriots.

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